Leader VS Boss

Anyone can be a leader. A boss however is a job description. I’ve been an employee and am currently a boss. The reality that I have summarized after all these years is that anyone can be a leader, as long as they can influence others to do something.

If you give a presentation or talk, and it influences someone to do something, you are a leader. If a boss is a leader, they can influence and inspire someone to do better. The problem lies with a boss telling you what to do, or a leader stating, "I believe in what you are doing". If you have a vision to make things constantly better, others should do it without asking. They should think of those solutions on their own. If they are truly free to make decisions, then they lead the way. You just follow the leader.

I will soon be entering my 2^nd year of the early thirties age category. To be eligible in receiving my title as a “mature adult”, one of the core lessons to be passed is "Leadership 300", hopefully soon!

Oprah & Cathy Black

Fasenomi

Fasenomi tidak ada hubungannya dengan Astronomi, dan tidak ada hubungannya dengan ilmu-ilmu mengenai apapun atau dengan istilah-istilah yang sudah ada. Tapi Fasenomi yang saya maksudkan disini adalah istilah yang saya buat-buat sendiri, berasal dari gabungan kata fase dan nomos. Fase yang artinya tahap, dan nomos yang artinya hukum.

Saya sendiri bukan seorang psikolog, tapi saya gemar mengamati tingkah laku baik tingkah laku saya sendiri maupun tingkah laku orang lain. Ini juga adalah dasar dari semua lagu yang pernah saya tulis. Dengan bantuan pengalaman saya sendiri, maka saya mendefinisikan sendiri arti istilah Fasenomi sebagai hukum dalam tahap kehidupan, yang saya sendiri sedang jalani, dan sulit untuk di hindari.

Fase awal dari segalanya adalah saat seorang bayi lahir dan harus belajar melakukan segalanya dari nol. Pada fase Balita dan Kanak-kanak, mereka harus mulai belajar mengaplikasian apa yang mereka pelajari sejak bayi untuk beradaptasi dengan lingkungannya mulai dari tindakan, pikiran hingga perkataan. Fase Remaja, orang harus belajar memilih, mengambil tindakan dan mempertanggung jawabkannya. Orang dewasa, di cap harus tahu segala-galanya, padahal masih ada beberapa fase lagi yang harus dijalani sebelum orang dewasa itu bisa di cap “Serba Bisa” (meskipun kayaknya sih nggak ada orang yang tahu segalanya ya?).

Pada fase dewasa muda, seseorang akan belajar memilih pekerjaan, memilih pasangan hidup, harus jatuh bangun dengan kegagalan dan keberhasilan. Dewasa muda juga kerap dituntut untuk menjalani kehidupan sesuai dengan dinamika yang berlaku disaat itu sehingga harus bisa berpikir dengan cepat. Fase ini penuh dengan trial dan error, namun sangat menentukan!

Pada Fase Dewasa matang (usia 30 s/d 40 thn) akan meraup keberhasilan yang mereka peroleh karena pengambilan keputusan yang tepat saat masih berada dalam fase dewasa muda atau harus bekerja keras memperbaiki kesalahan yang mereka buat dalam fase dewasa muda. Dalam fase ini cara berpikir sudah mulai njelimet karena pengambilan keputusan harus diimbangi tidak hanya dengan sikon yang berlaku pada saat itu, tapi juga dampak-dampak kedepannya.

Untuk fase-fase berikutnya, saya belum bisa memberikan ringkasan karena saya belum mengalaminya. Mayoritas teman-teman saya juga belum ada yang berada di atas usia tersebut.

Saya hanya bisa menggeleng-gelengkan kepala, karena dalam dunia karir atau bisnis sendiri juga hukum fasenomi ini kerap berlaku. Saat sebuah usaha baru dijalankan, tentu banyak yang harus dipelajari dan dialami sendiri supaya bisa introspeksi dan evaluasi. Tapi kenapa beberapa hal susah banget untuk diterima ya? Gue males ngejabarin apa masalahnya karena gue males memutar otak untuk terlalu mikirin sesuatu yang sebab musababnya sudah sangat jelas :( besok2 gue tulis sesuatu yang riang yah... sesuai dengan mood.

*) tulisan diatas hanya rangkuman opini pribadi, berdasarkan kebingungan penulis belaka. Alias nggak penting ya? hehehehe

New Headache on Designing New Logo

Recently, I have been reading lots of articles about logo design. My intention is to improve my awareness about latest trends in logo design. Since I never formally study Graphic Design, I’ve only recently found out that originally logos were only used as Royal Symbols or Country Symbols (I noticed the truth in this statement right away because I watched too many historical movies). In today’s modern era, logos are being used everywhere as trademarks and it has evolved to be a very complex process.

We are living in Indonesia. Whether we like it or not a lot of people are very superstitious! Sometimes some went soooo overboard that it became soooo irrational. On the contrary, I still found another article claiming that there are only three important elements that need to be considered in designing a logo, which are: Name, Symbol and Color.

Gathering my clients’ different perspectives in a quick summary, elements that I really really really need to consider in designing a logo are: Date of Birth of the product/service owner, Auspicious Skewed Direction, Ratio of Logo & Typography, Lining, Minimalization, Future Applications, Negative Space, Avoiding “Inauspicious Arrows” and many more! Arrrrggghhh!!

While browsing the net, I found a very good-short-comprehensive article by a professional graphic designer called David Airey about logo design. Please do read it when you have time. Why can’t today's modern people be as simple as this guy? It will make all designers' life a whole lot easier.... :P

Hooray to the designers of Nike, McDonalds, Apple, Google, Yahoo and many other very successful logo designers!!!

Blog Linking Success!

Hi y’all! Hope you are doing fine today.

Today I have fulfilled my curiosity about how to link my Friendster blog to other RSS Feed Reader application. I was not just finding mere ways to copy and paste instructions, but I really want to learn how to maximize blog for other usage.

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. This really helps to reduce number of junk mail coming in to your Inbox everyday!

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

The Atom Syndication Format is the next generation of XML-based file formats, designed to allow information--the contents of web pages, for example--to be syndicated between applications. Like RSS before it, Atom places the content and metadata of an internet resource into a machine-parsable format, perfect for displaying, filtering, remixing, and archiving. I notice that this is what Friendster is using to allow people to syndicate the content to other RSS Feed.

FOR EXAMPLE:

If you are also interested to use RSS Feed Reader application in Facebook, and would like to link your current blog or if you want to share your favorite blog to your friends in facebook, here’s how easy it is:

Look for this word at the end of an address every time you want to subscribe: .atom or .xml.

And then type it to the FEED URL.

(with ATOM): http://yourblog.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/atom.xml

And then type your blog name to the website URL:http://yourblog.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/

Or (with RSS format):http://rssblog.whatisrss.com/feed/

There are several different codes at the end of every URL address, but you can only subscribe if this sign is shown on the right side of your Address Bar:

Just click it and copy the URL shown on the address bar to your Feed URL column. Once you understand everything, you can add a lot of features to get your blog to be more attractive. You can use it to do your small business, to post information, to publish your thoughts or just to tell people about what’s going on in your life.

Have fun & good luck trying!

My New Favorite Song

My best friend asked me just last month... "Chasing Pavements artinya apa sih?" ... I knew that it is a song title from a new UK artist called Adele. But (again) because I sometimes lacking of attention in minor details, I never really notice because the song just plays out of my attention.

But to answer her question, I need to find out the sentence, so I listened to the song.
Adele, Chasing Pavements
(while trying to upload the video, i got so frustrated trying to find the link button for YouTube and I bothered a friend to help me hahahaha)

From that, I concluded my own understanding for the meaning of Chasing Pavements, for me, it is a metaphor to describe a never ending journey to something that is out of reach. In Adele's song, perhaps it is a feeling that can never be understood or a love that is too hard to attain. But then again, I'm Indonesian, so what do I know? hahahaha.. feel free to comment me on those definition/understanding, the more the merrier!

Unbelievably, Adele got such an amazingly unique voice. Not just Chasing Pavements, I also love the song Make You Feel My Love, gave me shivers down my spines hehehehe... also Crazy For You.

So from there on... Adele became my new favorite singer.

Learning about Blog

Recently my friend Ari told me to pay a little bit more attention to BLOG. Ironically, it is because I have already published a book about BLOG, a collection of funny short stories that came from my friend Aloy's blog in Friendster. Though I am already aware about BLOG, I only have the one in my Friendster and honestly, I didn't have any interest to make another one.

Ever since the start of this week, my attention was caught by the benefits that I can gain by having a proper blog, after noticing that a few of my family & friends have already gained exactly that. One benefit is for sure, which is that I can tell a story once and then being read by hundreds or thousands (which saves me time to tell one same story more than twice) hahahaha...

I tried to link my old Friendster blog to RSS Feed Reader application in Facebook. But I failed miserably even after asking not just one, but THREE EXPERTS, Ari, Pico & Tony!!! Apparently there are some incompatibilities or maybe some errors in the linking process or something. What ever it is, it is too much for me to understand! Huuuuuuuu.... lucky I don't have much in Friendster. My curiosity then got me going to read more about Blog and it has gotten to the part where I found these blog sites such as blogspot, twitter, etc.

After asking around about these alternatives, people are highly recommending me to use blogspot. When I first arrived at the home page of blogspot, which is www.blogger.com, it kept asking me to login with my gmail account and I freaked out thinking that it might be a scam that tried to trick me and get me to type in my email password.... *don't laugh guys... i'm trying to learn!"
But, apparently, Google is the owner of this site. So that is enough to get me going, this is where I found out: http://www.blogger.com/about
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/all-aboard.html

Anyways, for those of you who are worst then me, check out the definition of Blog according to Wikipedia:
A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

If you want to know more about Blog, just go read the comprehensive information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog. <-- beauty isn't it?? I don't have to explained it my self! hahahaha

So friends, have fun blogging, but blog with caution!